The incidence of cervical cancer is starting to rise in low-income U.S. counties and has plateaued in high-income counties in recent years, after years of decreases, according to a new study led by investigators from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) and published in JNCI Cancer Spectrum.
Cervical cancer is one of six major human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers and the only one currently preventable through screening. The other types of HPV-associated cancers are oropharyngeal, anal, penile, vaginal, and vulvar. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year more than 46,000 HPV-associated cancers are diagnosed in the US — over 25,000 among women and 20,000 among men.
Investigators led by Ashish A. Deshmukh, PhD, MPH, associate professor in the Department of Management, Policy and Community Health at UTHealth School of Public Health, conducted a retrospective study of men and women diagnosed with HPV-associated cancers in the U.S. from 2000 through 2018 in the 21 registries in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program. They estimated incidence trends according to county-level household income and smoking prevalence. There were 252,648 cases of HPV-associated cancers included in the analysis.
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